Dramatic Technique Part 1

Dramatic Technique.

by George Pierce Baker.

PREFACE

"The dramatist is born, not made." This common saying grants the dramatist at least one experience of other artists, namely, birth, but seeks to deny him the instruction in art granted the architect, the painter, the sculptor, and the musician. Play-readers and producers, however, seem not so sure of this distinction, for they are often heard saying: "The plays we receive divide into two cla.s.ses: those competently written, but trite in subject and treatment; those in some way fresh and interesting, but so badly written that they cannot be produced." Some years ago, Mr. Savage, the manager, writing in _The Bookman_ on "The United States of Playwrights," said: "In answer to the question, 'Do the great majority of these persons know anything at all of even the fundamentals of dramatic construction?' the managers and agents who read the ma.n.u.scripts unanimously agree in the negative. Only in rare instances does a play arrive in the daily mails that carries within it a vestige of the knowledge of the science of drama-making. Almost all the plays, furthermore, are extremely artificial and utterly devoid of the quality known as human interest." All this testimony of managers and play-readers shows that there is something which the dramatist has not as a birthright, but must learn. Where? Usually he is told, "In the School of Hard Experience." When the young playwright whose ma.n.u.script has been returned to him but with favorable comment, asks what he is to do to get rid of the faults in his work, both evident to him and not evident, he is told to read widely in the drama; to watch plays of all kinds; to write with endless patience and the resolution never to be discouraged. He is to keep submitting his plays till, by this somewhat indefinite method of training, he at last acquires the ability to write so well that a ma.n.u.script is accepted. This is "The School of Experience." Though a long and painful method of training, it has had, undeniably, many distinguished graduates.

Why, however, is it impossible that some time should be saved a would-be dramatist by placing before him, not mere theories of play-writing, but the practice of the dramatists of the past, so that what they have shared in common, and where their practice has differed, may be clear to him? That is all this book attempts. To create a dramatist would be a modern miracle. To develop theories of the drama apart from the practice of recent and remoter dramatists of different countries would be visionary. This book tries in the light of historical practice merely to distinguish the permanent from the impermanent in technique. It endeavors, by showing the inexperienced dramatist how experienced dramatists have solved problems similar to his own, to shorten a little his time of apprentices.h.i.+p. The limitations of any such attempt I fully recognize. This book is the result of almost daily discussion for some years with cla.s.ses of the ideas contained in it, but in that discussion there was a chance to treat with each individual the many exceptions, apparent or real, which he could raise to any principle enunciated. Such full discussion is impossible in a book the size of this one. Therefore I must seem to favor an instruction far more dogmatic than my pupils know from me. No textbook can do away with the value of proper cla.s.sroom work. The practice of the past provides satisfactory principles for students of ordinary endowment. A person of long experience or unusually endowed, however, after grasping these principles, must at times break from them if he is to do his best work. The cla.s.sroom permits a teacher such adaptations of existing usage. Such special needs no textbook can forestall. This book, then, is meant, not to replace wise cla.s.sroom instruction, but to supplement it or to offer what it can when such instruction is impossible.

The contents of this book were originally brought together from notes for the cla.s.sroom as eight lectures delivered before the Lowell Inst.i.tute, Boston, in the winter of 1913. They were carefully reworked for later lectures before audiences in Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

Indeed, both in and out of the cla.s.sroom they have been slowly revised in the intervening five years. Detailed consideration of the one-act play has been reserved for later special treatment. Otherwise the book attempts to treat helpfully the many problems which the would-be dramatist must face in learning the fundamentals of a very difficult but fascinating art.

I have written for the person who cannot be content except when writing plays. I wish it distinctly understood that I have not written for the person seeking methods of conducting a course in dramatic technique. I view with some alarm the recent mushroom growth of such courses throughout the country. I gravely doubt the advisability of such courses for undergraduates. Dramatic technique is the means of expressing, for the stage, one's ideas and emotions. Except in rare instances, undergraduates are better employed in filling their minds with general knowledge than in trying to phrase for the stage thoughts or emotions not yet mature. In the main I believe instruction in the writing of plays should be for graduate students. Nor do I believe that it should be given except by persons who have had experience in acting, producing, and even writing plays, and who have read and seen the drama of different countries and times. Mere lectures, no matter how good, will not make the students productive. The teacher who is not widely eclectic in his tastes will at best produce writers with an easily recognizable stamp. In all creative courses the problem is not, "What can we make these students take from us, the teachers?" but, "Which of these students has any creative power that is individual? Just what is it? How may it be given its quickest and fullest development?" Complete freedom of choice in subject and complete freedom in treatment so that the individuality of the artist may have its best expression are indispensable in the development of great art. At first untrained and groping blindly for the means to his ends, he moves to a technique based on study of successful dramatists who have preceded him. From that he should move to a technique that is his own, a mingling of much out of the past and an adaptation of past practice to his own needs. This book will help the development from blind groping to the acquirement of a technique based on the practice of others. It can do something, but only a little, to develop the technique that is highly individual. The instruction which most helps to that must be done, not by books, not by lectures, but in frequent consultation of pupil and teacher. The man who grows from a technique which permits him to write a good play because it accords with historical practice to the technique which makes possible for him a play which no one else could have written, must work under three great Masters: Constant Practice, Exacting Scrutiny of the Work, and, above all, Time. Only when he has stood the tests of these Masters is he the matured artist.

GEO. P. BAKER

DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE

CHAPTER I

TECHNIQUE IN DRAMA: WHAT IT IS. THE DRAMA AS AN INDEPENDENT ART

This book treats drama which has been tested before the public or which was written to be so tested. It does not concern itself with plays, past or present, intended primarily to be read--closet drama. It does not deal with theories of what the drama, present or future, might or should be. It aims to show what successful drama has been in different countries, at different periods, as written by men of highly individual gifts.

The technique of any dramatist may be defined, roughly, as his ways, methods, and devices for getting his desired ends. No dramatist has this technique as a gift at birth, nor does he acquire it merely by writing plays. He reads and sees past and present plays, probably in large numbers. If he is like most young dramatists, for example Shakespeare on the one hand and Ibsen on the other, he works imitatively at first. He, too, has his _Love's Labor's Lost_, or _Feast at Solhaug_. Even if his choice of topic be fresh, the young dramatist inevitably studies the dramatic practice just preceding his time, or that of some remoter period which attracts him, for models on which to shape the play he has in mind. Often, in whole-hearted admiration, he gives himself to close imitation of Shakespeare, one of the great Greek dramatists, Ibsen, Shaw, or Brieux. For the moment the better the imitation, the better he is satisfied; but shortly he discovers that somehow the managers or the public, if his play gets by the managers, seem to have very little taste for great dramatists at second hand. Yet the history of the drama has shown again and again that a dramatist may owe something to the plays of a preceding period and achieve success. The influence of the Greek drama on _The Servant in the House_ is unmistakable. _Kismet_, Mr.

k.n.o.bloch frankly states, was modeled on the loosely constructed Elizabethan plays intended primarily to tell a story of varied and exciting incident. Where lies the difficulty? Just here. Too many people do not recognize that dramatic technique--methods and devices for gaining in the theatre a dramatist's desired ends--is historically of three kinds: universal, special, and individual. First there are certain essentials which all good plays, from aeschylus to Lord Dunsany, share at least in part. They are the qualities which make a play a play. These the tyro must study and may copy. To the discussion and ill.u.s.tration of them the larger part of this book is devoted. Secondly, there is the special technique of a period, such as the Elizabethan, the Restoration, the period of Scribe and his influence, etc. A good ill.u.s.tration of this kind of technique is the difference in treatment of the Antony and Cleopatra story by Shakespeare in his play of that name, and by John Dryden in _All For Love_. Each dramatist worked sincerely, believing the technique that he used would give him best, with the public he had in mind, his desired effects. The public of Shakespeare would not have cared for Dryden's treatment: the Restoration found Shakespeare barbaric until reshaped by dramatists whose touch today often seems that of a vandal facing work the real beauty of which he does not understand. The technique of the plays of Corneille and Racine, even though they base their dramatic theory on cla.s.sical practice, differs from the Greek and from Seneca. In turn the drama which aimed to copy them, the so-called Heroic Plays of England from 1660 to 1700, differed. That is, a story dramatized before when re-presented to the stage must share with the drama of the past certain characteristics if it is to be a play at all, but to some extent it must be presented differently. Why? Because, first, the dramatist is using a stage different from that of his forebears, and, secondly, because he is writing for a public of different standards in morals and art. Comparison for a moment of the stage of the Greeks with the stage of the Elizabethans, the Restoration, or of today shows the truth of the first statement. Comparison of the religious and social ideals of the Greeks with those of Shakespeare's audience, Congreve's public, Tom Robertson's, or the public of today shows the truth of the second. That is, the drama of any past time, if studied carefully, must reveal the essentials of the drama throughout time. It must reveal, too, methods and devices effective for the public of its time, but not effective at present. It is doubtless true that usually a young dramatist may gain most light as to the technique of the period on which he is entering from the practice of the playwrights just preceding him, but this does not always follow. Witness the sharp revolt, particularly in France and Germany, in the early nineteenth century, from Cla.s.sicism to Romanticism. Witness, too, the change late in that century from the widespread influence of Scribe to the almost equally widespread influence of Ibsen.

The chief gift of the drama of the past to the young playwright, then, is ill.u.s.tration of what is essential in drama. This he safely copies.

Study of the technique of a special period, if the temper of his public closely resembles the interests, prejudices, and ideals of the period he studies, may give him even larger results. Such close resemblance, however, is rare. Each period demands in part its own technique. What in that technique is added to the basal practice of the past may even be to some extent the contribution of the young dramatist in question.

Resting on what he knows of the elements common to all good drama, alert to the significance of the hints which the special practice of any period may give him, he thinks his way to new methods and devices for getting with his public his desired effects. Many or most of these the other dramatists of his day discover with him. These, which make the special usage of his time, become the technique of his period.

Perhaps, however, he has added something in technique particularly his own, to be found in the plays of no other man. This, the third sort of technique, is to be seen specially in the work of the great dramatists.

Usually, it is peculiarly inimitable and elusive because the result of a particular temperament working on problems of the drama peculiar to a special time. Imitation of this individual technique in most instances results, like wearing the tailor-made clothes of a friend, in a palpable misfit.

It is just because the enthusiast copies, not simply what is of universal significance in the practice of some past period, but with equal closeness what is special to the time and individual to the dramatist, that his play fails. He has produced something stamped as not of his time nor by him, but as at best a successful literary exercise in imitation. Of the three kinds of technique, then,--universal, special, and individual,--a would-be dramatist should know the first thoroughly.

Recognizing the limitations of the second and third, he should study them for suggestions rather than for models. When he has mastered the first technique, and from the second has made his own what he finds useful in it, he is likely to pa.s.s to the third, his individual additions.

Why, however, should men or women who have already written stories long or short declared by competent people to be "dramatic," make any special study of the technique of plays? Like the dramatist, they must understand characterization and dialogue or they could not have written successful stories. Evidently, too, they must know something about structure. Above all, they must have shown ability so to represent people in emotion as to arouse emotional response in their readers, or their work would not be called dramatic. Why, then, should they not write at will either in the form of stories or of plays? It is certainly undeniable that many novels seem in material and at moments in treatment, as dramatic as plays on similar subjects. In each, something is said or done which moves the reader or hearer as the author wishes.

These facts account for the widespread and deeply-rooted belief that any novelist or writer of short stories should write successful plays if he wishes, particularly if adapting his own work for the stage. The facts account, too, for the repeated efforts in the past to put popular novels on the stage as little changed as possible. Is it not odd that most adaptations of successful stories and most novelizations of successful plays are failures? The fact that the drama had had for centuries in England and elsewhere a fecund history before the novel as a form took shape at all would intimate that the drama is a different and independent art from that of the novel or the short story. When novelists and would-be playwrights recognize that it is, has been, and ought to be an independent art, we shall be spared many bad plays.

It is undeniable that the novelist and the dramatist start with common elements--the story, the characters, and the dialogue. If their common ability to discern in their story or characters possible emotional interests for other people, their so-called "dramatic sense," is "to achieve success on the stage it must be developed into theatrical talent by hard study and generally by long practice. For theatrical talent consists in the power of making your characters not only tell a story by means of dialogue but tell it in such skilfully devised form and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical representation, give rise to the greatest possible amount of that peculiar kind of emotional effect, the production of which is the one great function of the theatre."[1] Certain underlying differences between the relation of the novelist to his reader and that of the dramatist to his audience reveal why the art of each must be different.

The relative s.p.a.ce granted novelist and dramatist is the first condition which differentiates their technique. A play of three acts, say forty pages each of ordinary typewriter paper, will take in action approximately a hundred and fifty minutes, or two hours and a half. When allowance is made for waits between the acts, the ma.n.u.script should probably be somewhat shorter. A novel runs from two hundred and fifty to six hundred pages. Obviously such difference between the length of play and novel means different methods of handling material. The dramatist, if he tries for the same results as the novelist, must work more concisely. This demands very skilful selection among his materials to gain his desired effects in the quickest possible ways.

A novel we read at one or a half-dozen sittings, as we please. When we so wish, we can pause to consider what we have just read, or can re-read it. In the theatre, a play must be seen as a whole and at once.

Listening to it, we cannot turn back, we cannot pause to reflect, for the play pushes steadily on to the close of each act. Evidently, then, here is another reason why a play must make its effects more swiftly than a novel. This needed swiftness requires methods of making effects more obviously and more emphatically than in the novel. In a play, then, while moving much more swiftly than in a novel, we must at any given moment be even clearer than in the novel. What the dramatist selects for presentation must be more productive of immediate effect than is the case with the novelist, for one swingeing blow must, with him, replace repeated strokes by the novelist.

In most novels, the reader is, so to speak, personally conducted, the author is our guide. In the drama, so far as the dramatist is concerned, we must travel alone. In the novel, the author describes, narrates, a.n.a.lyzes, and makes his personal comment on circ.u.mstance and character.

We rather expect a novelist to reveal himself in his work. On the other hand, the greatest dramatists, such as Shakespeare and Moliere, in their plays reveal singularly little of themselves. It is the poorer dramatists--Dryden, Jonson, Chapman--who, using their characters as mouthpieces, reveal their own personalities. Now that soliloquy and the aside have nearly gone out of use, the dramatist, when compared with the novelist, seems, at first thought, greatly hampered in his expression.

He never can use description, narration, a.n.a.lysis, and personal comment as his own. He may use them only in the comparatively rare instances when they befit the character speaking. His mainstay is ill.u.s.trative action appropriate to his characters, real or fict.i.tious. Surely so great a difference will affect the technique of his art. The novel, then, may be, and often is, highly personal; the best drama is impersonal.

The theatre in which the play is presented also produces differences between the practice of the dramatist and that of the novelist. No matter how small the theatre or its stage, it cannot permit the intimacy of relation which exists between reader and book. A person reads a book to himself or to a small group. In most cases, he may choose the conditions under which he will read it, indoors or out, alone or with people about him, etc. In the theatre, according to the size of the auditorium, from one hundred to two thousand people watch the play, and under given conditions of light, heat, and ventilation. They are at a distance, in most cases, from the stage. It is shut off from them more than once in the performance by the fall of the curtain. The novel appeals to the mind and the emotions through the eye. The stage appeals to both eye and ear. Scenery, lighting, and costuming render unnecessary many descriptions absolutely required in the novel. The human voice quickens the imagination as the mere printed page cannot in most cases.

These unlike conditions are bound to create differences in the presentation of the same material.

It is just this greater concreteness and consequent greater vividness of the staged play which makes us object to seeing and hearing in the theatre that of which we have read with comparative calmness in the newspaper, the magazine, or the novel. Daily we read in the newspapers with unquickened pulse of horror after horror. Merely to see a fatal runaway or automobile accident sends us home sickened or unnerved. We read to the end, though horrified, the _Red Laugh_ of Andreiev.

Reproduce accurately on the stage the terrors of the book and some persons in the audience would probably go as mad as did people in the story. This difference applies in our att.i.tude toward moral questions as treated in books or on the stage. "Let us instance the _Matron of Ephesus_. This acrid fable is well known; it is unquestionably the bitterest satire that was ever made on female frivolity. It has been recounted a thousand times after Petronius, and since it pleased even in the worst copy, it was thought that the subject must be an equally happy one for the stage.... The character of the matron in the story provokes a not unpleasant sarcastic smile at the audacity of wedded love; in the drama this becomes repulsive, horrible. In the drama, the soldier's persuasions do not seem nearly so subtle, importunate, triumphant, as in the story. In the story we picture to ourselves a sensitive little woman who is really in earnest in her grief, but succ.u.mbs to temptation and to her temperament, her weakness seems the weakness of her s.e.x, we therefore conceive no especial hatred towards her, we deem that what she does nearly every woman would have done. Even her suggestion to save her living lover by means of her dead husband we think we can forgive her because of its ingenuity and presence of mind; or rather its very ingenuity leads us to imagine that this suggestion may have been appended by the malicious narrator who desired to end his tale with some right poisonous sting. Now in the drama we cannot harbour this suggestion; what we hear has happened in the story, we see really occur; what we would doubt of in the story, in the drama the evidence of our own eyes settles incontrovertibly. The mere possibility of such an action diverted us; its reality shows it in all its atrocity; the suggestion amused our fancy, the execution revolts our feelings, we turn our backs to the stage and say with the Lykas of Petronius, without being in Lykas's peculiar position: 'Had the emperor been just, he would have restored the body of the father to its tomb and crucified the woman.' And she seems to us the more to deserve this punishment, the less art the poet has expended on her seduction, for we do not then condemn in her weak woman in general, but an especially volatile, worthless female in particular."[2]

As Lessing points out, in the printed page we can stand a free treatment of social question after social question which on the stage we should find revolting. Imagine the horror and outcry if we were to put upon the stage a dramatized newspaper or popular magazine. Just in this intense vividness, this great reality of effect, lies a large part of the power of the stage. On the other hand, this very vividness may create difficulties. For instance, the novelist can say, "So, in a silence, almost unbroken, the long hours pa.s.sed." But we watching, on the stage, the scene described in the novel, know perfectly that only a few minutes have elapsed. From this difficulty have arisen, to create a sense of time, the Elizabethan use of the Chorus, our _entr'acte_ pauses, interpolated scenes which draw off our attention from the main story, and many other devices. But even with all the devices of the past, it is well-nigh impossible in a one-act play or in an act of one setting to create the feeling that much time has pa.s.sed. Many an attempt has been made to dramatize in one act Stevenson's delightful story, _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_, but all have come to grief because the greater vividness of the stage makes the necessary lapse of considerable time too apparent. It is not difficult for the story-teller to make us believe that, between a time late one evening and early the next morning, Blanche de Maletroit lost completely her liking for one man and became more than ready to marry Denis de Beaulieu, who entered the house for the first time on this same evening. On the stage, motivation and dialogue must be such as to make so swift a change entirely convincing even though it occur merely in the time of the acting. The motivation that was easy for the novelist as he explained how profoundly Blanche was moved by winning words or persuasive action of Denis, becomes almost impossible unless the words and action when seen and heard are for us equally winning and persuasive. The time difficulty in this story has led to all sorts of amusing expedients to account for Blanche's complete change of feeling. One young author went so far as to make the first lover of Blanche flirt so desperately with a maid-servant off stage that the report of his conduct by a jealous man-servant was the last straw to bring about the change in Blanche's feelings. Though aiming at a real difficulty, this device missed because it so vulgarized the original.

When all is said and done, this time difficulty caused by the greater vividness of stage presentation remains the chief obstacle in the way of the dramatist who would write of a sequence of historical events or of evolution or devolution in character. Again we foresee probable differences in technique, this time caused by the theatre, the stage, and the intense vividness of the latter.

The novel is, so to speak, the work of an individual; a play is a cooperative effort--of author, actor, producer, and even audience.

Though the author writes the play, it cannot be properly judged till the producer stages it, the players act it, and the audience approves or disapproves of it. Undeniably the dialogue of a play must be very different from that of a novel because the gesture, facial expression, intonation, and general movement of the actor may in large part replace description, narration, and even parts of the dialogue of a novel. We have good dialogue for a novel when Cleopatra says, "I'll seem the thing I am not; Antony will be himself." The fact and the characterization are what count here. In the same scene, Antony, absorbed in adoration of Cleopatra, cries, when interrupted by a messenger from Rome, "Grates me; the sum." Here we need the action of the speaker, his intonation, and his facial expression, if the speech is to have its full value. In its context, however, it is as dramatic dialogue perfect. In a story or novel, mere clearness would demand more because the author could not be sure that the reader would hit the right intonation or feel the gesture which must accompany the words. It is in large part just because dramatic dialogue is a kind of shorthand written by the dramatist for the actor to fill out that most persons find plays more difficult reading than novels. Few untrained imaginations respond quickly enough to feel the full significance of the printed page of the play. On the other hand, any one accustomed to read plays often finds novels irritating because they tell so much more than is necessary for him who responds quickly to emotionalized speech properly recorded.

Just as dialogue for the stage is incomplete without the actor, so, too, the stage direction needs filling out. Made as concise as possible by the dramatist, it is meant to be packed with meaning, not only for the actor, but for the producer. The latter is trusted to fill out, in as full detail as his means or his desires permit, the hints of stage directions as to setting and atmosphere. On the producer depends wholly the scenery, lighting, and properties used. All of this the novelist supplies in full detail for himself. An intelligent producer who reads the play with comprehension but follows only the letter of the stage directions gives a production no more than adequate at best. An uncomprehending and self-willed producer may easily so confuse the values of a well-written play as to ruin its chances. A thoroughly sympathetic and finely imaginative producer may, like an equally endowed actor, reveal genuine values in the play unsuspected even by the dramatist himself. Surely writing stage directions will differ from the narration and description of a novel.

The novelist, as has been pointed out, deals with the individual reader, or through one reader with a small group. What has just been said makes obvious that the dramatist never works directly, but through intermediaries, the actors and the producer. More than that, he seeks to stir the individual, not for his own sake as does the novelist, but because he is a unit in the large group filling the theatre. The novelist--to make a rough generalization--works through the individual, the dramatist through the group. This is not the place to discuss in detail the relation of a dramatist to his audience, but it is undeniable that the psychology of the crowd in a theatre is not exactly the same thing as the sum total of the emotional responses of each individual in it to some given dramatic incident. The psychology of the individual and the psychology of the crowd are not one and the same. The reputation of the novelist rests very largely on the verdict of his individual readers. The dramatist must move, not a considerable number of individuals, but at least the great majority of his audience. He must move his audience, too, not by emotions individual to a considerable number, but by emotions they naturally share in common or by his art can be made to share. The dramatist who understands only the psychology of the individual or the small group may write a play well characterized, but he cannot write a successful play till he has studied deeply the psychology of the crowd and has thus learned so to present his chosen subject as to gain from the group which makes the theatrical public the emotional response he desires.

Obviously, then, from many different points of view, the great art of the novelist and the equally great art of the dramatist are not the same. It is the unwise holding of an opposite opinion which has led many a successful novelist into disastrous play-writing. It is the attempt to reproduce exactly on the stage the most popular parts of successful novels which has made many an adaptation a failure surprising to author and adapter. The whole situation is admirably summed up in a letter of Edward k.n.o.bloch, author of _Kismet_. "I have found it very useful, when asked to dramatize a novel, not to read it myself, but to get some one else to read it and tell me about it. At once, all the stuffing drops away, and the vital active part, the verb of the novel comes to the fore. If the story of a novel cannot be told by some one in a hundred words or so, there is apt to be no drama in it. If I were to write a play on Hamilton, I would look up an article in an encyclopaedia; then make a scenario; then read detailed biographies. Too much knowledge hampers. It is just for that reason that short stories are easier dramatized than long novels. The stories that Shakespeare chose for his plays are practically summaries. As long as they stirred his imagination, that was all he asked of them. Then he added his magic.

Once the novel has been told, make the scenario. Then read the novel after. There will be very little to alter and only a certain amount of touches to add." If, in accordance with this suggestion, an adapter would plan out in scenario the mere story of the novel he wishes to adapt for the stage, would then transfer to his scenario only so much of the novel as perfectly fits the needs of the stage; and finally with the aid of the original author, would rewrite the portions which can be used only in part, and with him compose certain parts entirely anew, we should have a much larger proportion of permanently successful adaptations.

Though it is true, then, that the novelist and the dramatist work with common elements of story, characterization and dialogue, the differing conditions under which they work affect their story-telling, their characterization, and their dialogue. The differences brought about by the greater speed, greater compactness, and greater vividness of the drama, with its impersonality, its cooperative nature, its appeal to the group rather than to the individual, create the fundamental technique which distinguishes the drama from the novel. This is the technique possessed in common by the dramatists of all periods. The art of the playwright is not, then, the art of the novelist. Throughout the centuries a very different technique has distinguished them.

"But," it may be urged, "all that has been said of the differences between the play and the novel shows that the play cramps truthful presentation of life. Is not play-writing an art of falsification rather than truth?" A living French novelist once exclaimed, "I have written novels for many years, with some returns in reputation but little return in money. Now, when a young actor helps me, I adapt one of my novels to the stage and this b.a.s.t.a.r.d art immediately makes it possible for me to buy automobiles." Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, toward the end of his life, to Mr. Sidney Colvin, "No, I will not write a play for Irving nor for the devil. Can you not see that the work of _falsification_, which a play demands is, of all tasks, the most ungrateful? And I have done it a long while,--and nothing ever came of it."[3] The trouble with both these critics of the drama was that they held a view of the stage which makes it necessary to shape, to twist, and to contort life when represented on it. While it is true that selection and compression underlie all dramatic art, as they underlie all of the pictorial arts, it is no longer true, as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, that dramatists believe that we should shape life to fit hampering conditions of the stage, accepted as inevitably rigid. Today we regard the stage, as we should, as plastic. If the stage of the moment forbids in any way the just representation of life, so much the worse for that stage; it must yield. The ingenuity of author, producer, scenic artist, and stage mechanician must labor until the stage is fitted to represent life as the author sees it. For many years now, the cry of the dramatist has been, not "Let us adapt life to the stage," but rather: "Let us adapt the stage, at any cost for it, at any cost of imaginative effort or mechanical labor, to adequate and truthful representation of life." The art of the playwright may be the art of fantasy or of realism, but for him who understands it rightly, not mistaking it for another art, and laboring till he grasps and understands its seeming mysteries, it can never be an art of falsification. Instead, it is the art that, drawing to its aid all its sister fine arts, in splendid cooperation, moves the ma.s.ses of men as does no other art. As Sir Arthur Pinero has said, "The art--the great and fascinating and most difficult art--of the modern dramatist is nothing else than to achieve that compression of life which the stage undoubtedly demands, without falsification."[4]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Robert Louis Stevenson: The Dramatist_, p. 7. Sir A. Pinero.

Chiswick Press, London.

[2] _Hamburg Dramaturgy_, pp. 329-330. Leasing. Bohn ed.

[3] _Robert Louis Stevenson: the Dramatist_, p. 30. Sir A. Pinero.

Chiswick Press, London.

[4] _Idem._

CHAPTER II